Nonfiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. DOROTHY DAYDissenting Voice of the American CenturyBy John Loughery and Blythe Randolph In March 2000, 20 years after her death, the Vatican began a stringent examination of Dorothy Day’s life to prove that she had demonstrated the “heroic virtue” that qualifies a Catholic for sainthood; this process is ongoing. More recently, in September 2015, Pope Francis cited Day — alongside Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and Thomas Merton — as an American who exemplified principles that were desperately needed in our inequitable world.
Day was a tireless advocate for the poor and homeless, but what exactly is a saint and was she one? Even though her middle-class Republican family had no interest in faith and her father shared a widely held disdain for Catholicism, Dorothy was attracted to religion from an early age. When she was 12, her parents allowed her to be baptized in the Episcopal Church, which she attended for a year before giving it up to focus on politics. She went on to lead a thoroughly bohemian life in Greenwich Village and embarked on a career in left-wing journalism.
In 1917, at the age of 20, she was arrested during a suffragist rally outside the White House and experienced for the first but not last time the terror and brutality of an American jail, with its filthy cells, exposed toilets, violent guards and, in this instance, the physiological and psychological nightmare of forced feedings. John Loughery and Blythe Randolph, who are seasoned biographers, claim that they will never again have such a “challenging and complex” subject as Day, implying that this in part justifies their biography, “Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century” — the first full-length portrait, according to the book jacket, to appear in 40 years. But it may also be true that Day’s life highlights tensions that are currently of concern to both Catholics and Americans. The authors render their subject in precise and meticulous detail, generating a vivid account of her political and religious development.
They also include perceptive portraits of her colleagues, lovers and friends, who in these early days included Mike Gold, a prominent American communist, and the playwright Eugene O’Neill. They chronicle her continued preoccupation with religion, which initially was fed by the great Russian writers: Gorky, who vividly depicted the tragedy of poverty; Chekhov, who emphasized the importance of empathy; and Dostoyevsky, who memorably described Aloysha Karamazov as a seeker of the “deep flame of inner ecstasy” that Day herself would pursue throughout her life. She also felt increasingly drawn to Catholic churches, where she was deeply moved by the cadences of medieval hymns as she stumblingly learned to pray the rosary. When, later, she read William James’s “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” she realized that during these quiet moments she had experienced the intuitive awareness that James called “prayerful consciousness.
Group Text “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse” will spark lively conversation among people who have run out of things to say. Welcome to Group Text, a mo...
” Loughery and Randolph write that she was also galvanized by James’s skeptical view of the Western ideal of progress, which, he argued, merely prioritized social conflict and commercial success. Increasingly, Day asked herself: Why are we here? What is life without transcendence? These questions became more urgent after a suicide attempt in the early 1920s, following a traumatic abortion, and again, later, when she gave birth to a child out of wedlock.
Determined that her daughter, Tamar, would not flounder as she had, Day had her baptized a Catholic, and followed her into the church in December 1927. She experienced what the authors call a “second conversion” during a series of retreats in the early 1940s led by Father John Hugo, which served to wed her socialist views to her new faith. Hugo insisted that Christianity involved a commitment to love, sacrifice and pacifism that secular society could no longer fathom.
“Day now hungered for action — demonstrations, marches and newspaper articles were no longer enough.”
In 1932 she had found a partner and soul mate in the brilliant French autodidact Peter Maurin, who believed that she could reform the Catholic Church much as St. Catherine of Siena had done in the 14th century. The following spring they founded The Catholic Worker — an implicit goad to the Communist Party’s Daily Worker — which argued that the cardinal sins of the United States were poverty, discrimination and exploitation, since the much vaunted American dream was clearly not available to everybody. The paper would eventually acquire 100,000 readers.
Less than two years later, Day and Maurin founded the Catholic Worker movement, establishing a group of residences across the country to provide food and shelter to the homeless. These homeless people were served by young volunteers who shared their guests’ poverty — a modern version of the hospitality that Benedictine monasteries had provided in Europe before the Reformation. Day and Maurin also tried, less successfully, to create self-sustaining farming communities, with the goal of furthering Maurin’s dream of a “green revolution” long before environmental issues became a public concern. Throughout her life, Day remained an impassioned and radical critic of United States policy.
She spoke against the draft in Congress shortly after the beginning of World War II, and in her lectures and articles, she condemned the use of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She later insisted that the Catholic President John F. Kennedy was as much to blame for the Cuban missile crisis as Nikita Khrushchev. When the Cold War was at its height, she vociferously asserted that the Soviets differed from the Gospels only in the methods they used to achieve equality.
Yet, paradoxically, Day the political radical was a rigidly conservative Catholic, accepting without demur church rulings on episcopal authority, papal infallibility, abortion, birth control, masturbation and premarital sex that encroached on personal liberty. She embraced doctrines and practices that Protestants had deplored since the Reformation: transubstantiation, the cult of Mary and the saints, the rosary, relics, confession and indulgences. For Loughery and Randolph, this stance exemplifies Day’s wholehearted approach to life; Day, they suggest, quoting a line from “The Mill on the Floss,” a novel she admired, was “never satisfied with a little of anything” and wanted to experience the entire Catholic package, warts and all. But while reading their respectful account, I began to wonder if Day’s religious conservatism might also, perhaps unconsciously, have been politically subversive.
Dorothy’s religiously inspired politics flagrantly challenged the Enlightenment ideals of the American Constitution. The British philosopher John Locke, for example, had declared that mixing politics and religion was a grievous, dangerous and existential error, and Thomas Jefferson too had famously called for a “wall of separation” between personal faith and public policy. In fact, however, religious faith had always inspired political and social action. Not only did Jesus and the prophets of Israel vehemently denounce those who prayed devoutly while neglecting the poor and oppressed, but Muhammad, Confucius, Mencius, Mahavira, the Buddha and Gandhi all insisted that personal piety was fruitless unless one worked tirelessly to relieve human suffering.
In the Hebrew Bible, the word for “holiness” (qadosh) literally means “set apart, other”; and the cultivation of sanctity has often been an “othering” — a deliberate and dramatic inversion of a social or spiritual norm. Passionately denouncing the inequity of his time, Francis of Assisi abjured his wealth and joined the beggars. Accused of flouting male authority by demanding that bishops and priests reform, Catherine of Siena starved herself, becoming frighteningly and androgynously “other. ” Ever since the Pilgrim fathers fled the “popery” of Europe, America’s national religion has been Protestant, and Catholicism was long felt to be incompatible with enlightened liberty.
In her wholehearted embrace of the Catholic faith, was Day also attempting an “othering,” tacitly and subversively suggesting that there were different ways of being a loyal citizen and devout Christian — that the radicalism of a St. Francis, indeed, of Jesus himself, spoke imperatively to the American dilemma?
Books of The Times It’s been 20 years since Anthony Bourdain published his best-selling memoir “Kitchen Confidential,” with its solemn warning: Never order fish...
August flew back to Michigan for Thanksgiving. It was his first time on an airplane, and even though he tried to be nonchalant about it, he held his breath duri...
